Et tu, Professor? Daniel Dennett admits that the fundamental atheist assumption is unproven in a Salon interview:
Are you saying a person is better served by relinquishing his faith in search of a more rational truth about the universe?
That’s a very good question and I don’t claim to have the answer yet. That’s why we have to do the research. Then we’ll have a good chance of knowing whether people are better served by reason or faith.
At least in this one instance, he’s more honest than Dawkins, Harris or your average irrational atheist, (henceforth “brigot” in honor of their silly, self-selected appellation), who all make the ironically faith-based claim that people are better served by reason.
You see, Reason cannot claim credit for modern medicine and modern agriculture without also claiming it for modern weaponry. And even that credit for food and medicine appears dubious in light of the sciencific claims that too many people currently infest the planet.
Dennett is totally wrong in his stated belief that all religious people fear either Reason or this debate. (Much less him and his books, three of which I picked up today….) Speaking only for myself, I say absolutely let us examine the question… I contend that Reason will ultimately prove to be less efficacious than Faith, since I already know that Reason serves me, rather more faithfully, in fact, than I manage to serve God.
Dennett, on the other hand, proves himself again and again to be nothing more than one of the apish clowns dancing slavishly at Reason’s court. Consider the following part of the interview:
Tell us the story from your new book about the ant and the blade of grass.
Suppose you go out in the meadow and you see this ant climbing up a blade of grass and if it falls it climbs again. It’s devoting a tremendous amount of energy and persistence to climbing up this blade of grass. What’s in it for the ant? Nothing. It’s not looking for a mate or showing off or looking for food. Its brain has been invaded by a tiny parasitic worm, a lancet fluke, which has to get into the belly of a sheep or a cow in order to continue its life cycle. It has commandeered the brain of this ant and it’s driving it up the blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle. That’s how this tiny lancet fluke does its evolutionary work.
Is religion, then, like a lancet fluke?
The question is, Does anything like that happen to us? The answer is, Well, yes. Not with actual brain worms but with ideas. An idea takes over our brain and gets that person to devote his life to the furtherance of that idea, even at the cost of their own genetics. People forgo having kids, risk their lives, devote their whole lives to the furtherance of an idea, rather than doing what every other species on the planet does — make more children and grandchildren.
As with Sam Harris, Dennett fails to realize that he is actually making a case against himself. It is an empirical fact that it is not religion that plays the role of the lancet fluke in causing individuals to “forgo having kids, risk their lives, devote their whole lives to the furtherance of an idea, rather than doing what every other species on the planet does”, but secularism in general, his cherished atheism in particular.